


Boom.

by StarMaamMke



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Implied Violence, Jealousy, Reconciliation Sex, Rough Sex, blow out fights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 01:47:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12595340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarMaamMke/pseuds/StarMaamMke
Summary: Joyce makes a rash decision in the interest of protecting her family. Hopper is not amused.





	Boom.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on two Tumblr prompts to celebrate my 300 followers. Thanks a million, you guys! Follow me at @starmaammke

The joints in Joyce’s hands were screaming with pain and stiffness when she pried them off of the steering wheel she had been white-knuckling. She took a deep shuddering breath as she put the car in park and killed in the engine. 

“You did it. It’s over,” she whispered, resting her forehead against the steering wheel as she wept. The platinum bob wig she was wearing became overbearingly itchy, so she tore it off and threw it onto the passenger side seat of her pinto. Her tears were mixing with the glue of her false eyelashes, making her eyes sting and her vision blur, so she pulled the spider-like extensions from her eyelids and stuck them onto the dashboard. 

After about three minutes of regaining her composure, she looked up through the window, towards her front porch. A hulking shadow of a figure stood staring out into the darkness, heavy feature illuminated when they lit a cigarette. Joyce’s heart stuck in her throat at the sight. Still, she had to get out of the car eventually, and she was so very tired. 

She pushed the driver’s side door of her Pinto open and stepped out into the October cold. Her thin jacket was hardly any protection against the air as she shivered upon approach. Beneath the jacket, she was wearing a skimpy, shimmery silver dress that fell mid-thigh to reveal long legs clad in black thigh-high stockings. She wobbled up the driveway in stilettos. 

“Are we going to talk about this?” Jim Hopper demanded, his tone quiet and dangerous - a low rumble that was sure to give way to thunder. Joyce walked past him and into their empty house.

“You can make the phone calls to get the kids out of hiding,” she intoned flatly, on her way to the bathroom. 

“Do. Not. Walk. Away. From. Me.” Hopper caught up to her and blocked the bathroom, his eyes blue fire and his face a mask of rage.

“I need to take a bath!” Joyce shouted, holding up her trembling hands. They were covered in blood, and in the revealing light of the house, the blood stains on her dress were visible as well. 

Hopper’s features softened at the sight of blood, his hands coming up to cup her face, his eyes searching for sign of injury. “Joyce…”

Joyce reared back and slapped away his hands. “It’s all his! Let me get by now.”

“I told you to let me handle this. I told you not to go after him.” Hopper closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What have you done?”

“He’s not a problem anymore. That’s what I did. I acted.” Joyce took the opportunity to push past him, open the door to the bathroom and step inside. She didn’t shut the door before she pulled the dress over her head and tossed it to the floor, revealing a red-lace push-up bra and high-cut panties that matched. She sat on the toilet to unsnap the suspenders of her garter belt, and she could feel the heat of his stare. 

“Are you kidding me with this, Joyce? What did you do?”

Joyce snapped her head up to meet his eyes. “No one recognized me. They can’t trace it back at all. When someone that looks like me comes walking through a Ritzy place like that, people tend to look the other way, because it’s none of their business - they don’t want it to be their business. It’s all too tawdry.”

She gave a violent start when Hopper punched the bathroom wall. He didn’t leave a hole in it, but when he pulled away, his knuckles were bleeding and raw, and there was a definite dent in the plaster. The tendons veins on his neck strained as he breathed through his nose, his face nearly scarlet as he stared at the dent. 

“Real mature,” she muttered, rolling the stockings down her legs. His head jerked towards her, his expression unchanged from the mask of rage he had directed at the bathroom wall. It was frightening to have the full focus of that killing look land on her.

“YOU PUT US ALL IN DANGER!” he thundered, tearing at his thinning dark blonde hair. “Jesus Christ, Joyce, you could’ve fucking died! What am I supposed to do with three kids? Huh? What do we have to gain from you acting alone like this? We’re a family and we need to act like a te-”

“IT WAS THE BEST PLAN AND NO ONE WAS ACKNOWLEDGING THE FACT BUT ME!” Joyce fired back, shooting onto her feet. 

“NO ONE ACKNOWLEDGED IT BECAUSE IT WAS SUICIDE, YOU CRAZY BITCH!”

With that, the fighting flame inside of Joyce was extinguished. She sat back down with hunched shoulders, her eyes wide with hurt and disbelief, her chin trembling. Hopper took a sharp breath and immediately came forward and dropped to his knees in front of her, the rage gone and replaced with grief-stricken remorse. When his hands came up to cup her face, she turned her head, her expression going flat - no anger, no sadness- just a blank stare and a mouth pressed into a thin line. 

“I didn’t - Joycie, I didn’t -…” Hopper’s voice broke as he tried to guide her gaze back to him. “Please look at me, I was just worried. When I figured out you went after Brenner - Jesus, we talked about this. We were going to wait.” 

Joyce stood in a swift motion that caused Hopper to totter backwards. She stepped around him to the bathtub, bending to turn the Hot Water dial all the way up. 

“I never should have said you were crazy.”

She poured bubble bath into the tub, which was starting to cause a steamy fog to cover the room. 

“I’ll leave you alone, but I really,  _really_ need you to acknowledge that I’m talking because this is driving me-”

“I hate you.” There was no real venom in the utterance, Joyce stated it as casually as one would remark upon the weather, but her eyes narrowed as it gauged his reaction. 

She hit her mark, and as promised, he left the room. 

* * *

 

While she was stewing in the bath, Hopper took a few minutes to process her words on the couch in the living-room; his face in his hands with his elbows resting on his knees as his body shook with tears of shame over what he had said, and hurt over her response to it. Eight minutes passed before he sniffled, wiped his face, straightened his back, and set his mind on making it right. 

He was in the doghouse for the night at least, he knew that much was true - it would do no good to press his case with words, not when she was that far gone in her anger. Once Joyce went into the Numb Place (Will called it her Robot Stage), she was usually there for the evening at minimum. 

So he put the kettle on, picked out her favorite book, and threw their comforter into the dryer on high heat for five minutes. He’d be sleeping on the couch, but she’d have access to tea, a literary escape, and a warm bed. It was a start, and he fully expected to come into the room the next morning to find the comforter on the floor, the book untouched, and the tea cup full and ice-cold, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t about making himself feel good, although he felt absolutely sick with wretchedness. 

Hopper just wanted them all to be safe. When it became clear that Brenner was alive, and actively sniffing around Hawkins again, the kids were sent into hiding. They weren’t sure if Brenner had any sort of designs on Will or Jonathan, but neither Hopper nor Joyce were willing to take any sort of risk. They had decided together. 

Then Joyce had started doing sleuthing on her own. She found out where Brenner was staying, and she somehow sussed out some of his more salacious habits. She formulated the plan herself, and Hopper hated it - not just because she would be masquerading as a sex worker to infiltrate the bastard’s room (though that was a HUGE part of his reservations), but because she wanted to act entirely alone, in a situation where only one person would come out of a room alive. He had begged,  _ begged  _ her to wait so he could call in favors to have it taken care of - something,  _ anything  _ had to be better than what she wanted to do.

Then she found El’s files. The ones that detailed every experiment, every horror the poor girl had gone through under Brenner’s care. That sealed it, and when Hopper came home from work and found the note from Joyce, apologizing for what she was about to do, he saw red. When Joyce returned, shaken but unhurt in that dress, he went supernova. 

Now that the dust had settled, he just wanted to tell her how sorry he was - to ask her if she was okay. She had taken a life; a monstrous life that had reveled in torturing children, but it had been a life all the same. She had done something huge for the greater good of the family, something that would follow her for the rest of her life, and Hopper had rewarded her by letting his jealousy, anxiety and rage go scorched earth. No wonder she said what she said - she probably felt it in that moment when he was grinding her down with his hateful words. 

Joyce emerged from the bathroom in a blue silk robe, her long, auburn hair falling in damp tendrils down past her shoulders just as Hopper was leaving their bedroom, his arms laden with spare blankets and pillows. When she noticed him, she stopped in her tracks and looked up with a tortured expression that sunk it’s claws straight into his gut. He dropped the linens and reached out for her.

“You did something huge tonight, Joyce, and I never asked how you-” she cut him off by stepping into his arms, squeezing him tightly, pressing her face against his chest and giving a shaky sigh that made her tiny frame tremble. 

“It was awful,” was her muffled response. 

“I’m such a fucking idiot,” he muttered hoarsely, holding her tight and pressing little kisses to the top of her head. “Jesus, of course it was awful. I’m so sorry.”

“He was alive and then he wasn’t and it was my fault, Hop!”

Hopper decided the best course of action was to say nothing, to let her open up to him, and for him to just fucking listen. He led her to the bedroom and tucked her into bed, handing her the tea when she sat with her back propped against the pillows. He sat on the edge of the bed. She was opening up to him, but that didn’t mean he was ready to assume he was welcome to lie with her in bed. There was no one else in the house, and she had probably been aching to unload her troubles- she probably would have done it with anyone who had an inkling of what she was going through. Still, she didn’t flinch when he placed a hand on her knee as she sipped her tea and processed.

“I’ll have to burn the dress. Shame, I kind of liked how I felt in it,” Joyce remarked after several minutes of silence. 

Hopper felt the not-quite-faded ache of jealousy twist and intensify at the mention of the scrap of shimmer and silver on the bathroom floor. His mind wandered to the sight of her in the red bra and panties, the garter belt, the thigh-highs… heat creeped up his neck, intensifying at his scalp and cheeks, and he felt the muscles in his shoulders go tense. Did Brenner get a good look? Did she let him touch? The little green demon whispered treacherously from the dark corner of his soul, urging him to give in, but he swallowed the questions, even as he hand fell from her knee.

“You want to know if anything happened,” Joyce stated. She always seemed to have a second sight when it came to Hopper, but he shook his head and shrugged. “You do.”

“This isn’t about how I feel.”

Joyce hugged her knees and continued to stare at him in that calm, steady way that never failed to unnerve him. “I walked into another man’s hotel room wearing next to nothing. I imagine that’s where the dent in the bathroom wall came from.”

Hopper stood up with a violent, jerking motion, his hands bawled up into fists as the demon took over. “Of course that’s where it came from! I can be worried about you and jealous at the same time, for fuck sake!” he thundered, spittle flying from his lips. He glared down at her, but her expression was unchanged. 

“Then ask.”

“Did he fucking touch you? Huh? Did you have to - did he-”

“Did he fuck me?”

Hopper let out an enraged cry, and began to storm towards the door. He needed to go outside and let his rage out in a safe place. There was no controlling it now.

“Don’t leave me!” Joyce screamed when his shaking hand grasped for the doorknob. 

“I can’t be here right now, I can’t -”

“I need you. I want to feel something other than this - this crushing guilt.”

Hopper stood with his back to her, his shoulders hunched as his whole body shook with the storm of hot, ugly feelings inside of him. “I’m either going to break a window or fuck you silly, and you don’t need-”

“Then fuck me silly. Windows are expensive.”

Hopper was on her in an instant, pulling her beneath him as he pinned her wrists above her head and tore into her mouth with greedy, attacking lips that devoured and nipped. She moaned in encouragement, lifting her hips to meet his, and hooking one leg around his waist. He tasted blood in his mouth, and were he in a different frame of mind, he would have murmured a sweet apology, but he wasn’t feeling a like a good man at the moment.

“Did he fuck you?” he growled against her ear as his hands moved down to tear open the robe she was still wearing. He drew a sharp gasp when his teeth closed over her earlobe, in a none-too-gentle nip. 

“No, but he certainly admired the view before I blew his brains out,” Joyce replied, tangling her fingers through his dark blonde hair and pushing him downwards. 

He bit and licked a path down her neck to her heaving breasts before spending time with them, drawing an aching nipple into his mouth as he kneaded her other breast with a large, exploring hand. She moved impatiently against him, taking the hand at her breast and guiding it downwards and - Jesus fuck he had never gotten her this wet in their entire history, not ever - making mewling little whimpers in his ear that shot clear down to his cock, and he knew that any further foreplay would just be gilding the lily. He groped wildly for the nightstand drawer to pull out a condom.

“Now,” she urged.

“Hold on,” he snapped back, shoving his jeans and boxers down. His cock sprang out, angry and red, and he gave it two sure strokes before rolling the condom down over it. In a swift motion, he hand her rolled over onto her hands and knees as he slid into her from behind in a brutal initial thrust that made her scream. His hands grasped at her hips as he pulled back and then in again, grunting in relief at the feeling of her want soaking his balls. “Jesus Christ, you are loving this,” he groaned, spurred on by her encouraging cries.

“Shut up and fuck me,” she growled. He moved one hand to her shoulder, providing more leverage as he took out his jealousy and frustration over her actions against her cunt. He got her off quickly, her body twitching and trembling as she let out a string of choice curse words. 

“I’m gonna…” he trailed off as he broke apart, spending himself in a series of hard, uncaring thrusts before they both collapsed against the mattress, panting and shivering with the aftershocks. He pulled her against him, pressing hot kisses against her cheek. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he repeated as his brain unfogged.

“You were angry. It doesn’t make it okay, but I get it,” she assured him, nuzzling against the crook of his neck.

They both fell into a silence, holding each other as tightly as possible, Hopper’s lips pressed against the top of her frizzy head. 

“Just don’t make me play Moneypenny to your James Bond ever again,” Hopper pleaded before they drifted off to sleep. “It sucked.”

 


End file.
